In recent decades, many scholars have spoken of reform absolutism rather than enlightened absolutism as a variant of absolutism, a change led by a group of German-speaking historians [7] who have clearly shifted the emphasis of the term and in part also its chronology, while other have retained the older term [5].
The term aufgeklärter Absolutismus was coined in 1847 and subsequently employed by the economist Wilhelm Roscher [1]; [2] (on its history…